Skip to content

Security Guide

The API Reliability Suite is designed with a "Secure by Default" mindset, implementing industry-standard protection for authentication, validation, and traffic control.

🔒 Security Architecture

Authentication & Authorization

The system uses JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for stateless authentication. - Provider: python-jose - Hashing: bcrypt (via passlib) - Key Storage: HMAC-SHA256 with the SECRET_KEY environment variable.

JWT Workflow

  1. Login: Users authenticate at /login.
  2. Token Issuance: Upon success, a signed JWT is returned with a 30-minute expiration (configurable via ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRE_MINUTES).
  3. Verification: Protected endpoints (e.g., /protected, /debug/summarize-errors) use the get_current_user dependency to validate the token's presence and signature.

🛡️ Traffic Control & Protection

Rate Limiting

We use slowapi (based on the fixed-window counter algorithm) to protect against brute-force attacks and resource exhaustion.

  • Storage: Local Memory (default).
  • Strategy: IP-based tracking via get_remote_address.
  • Implementation: applied via decorators on specific routes (e.g., @limiter.limit("5/minute") on /health).

Circuit Breaker

The pybreaker implementation protects the API from cascading failures when interacting with external dependencies. If an external service fails repeatedly, the circuit opens, preventing further strain and returning a graceful fallback.

🧪 Input Validation

Pydantic Strict Mode

The application uses Pydantic v2 with strict=True enabled in the model configuration. This ensures that: 1. Type Safety: Input types must match exactly (no automatic conversion of strings to ints). 2. Schema Enforcement: Only defined fields are accepted, preventing mass assignment vulnerabilities.

📋 Production Readiness Standard

Security Hardening Audit

  • [ ] Change SECRET_KEY: Ensure SECRET_KEY is set to a cryptographically strong value in production.
  • [ ] Enforce HTTPS: Always serve the API behind a TLS-terminating proxy (Nginx, Ingress-Nginx).
  • [ ] Review Log Levels: Ensure LOG_LEVEL is not set to debug in production to avoid leaking sensitive metadata.
  • [ ] Scale Rate Limiting: For distributed deployments, consider migrating slowapi storage to Redis.